Author with a penchant for love, laughter and peanut M&Ms (In no particular order)

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Well hello again, world!

Hola, amigos! So, my best intentions to keep an up-to-date blog have erm… well, the less said about that the better I reckon. What’s a few long months between friends, right?In my defence, I have been a very busy gal. I think I might hactually be a bloody caterpillar in fact, given that I disappeared into my bedroom some time around September and have only just emerged again, dazed and blinking (and not at all butterfly-like, I should mention) with plenty of empty chocolate wrappers, very hairy legs and, wait for it… ONLY A FINISHED BLEEDIN’ MANUSCRIPT!

WAHOOOO!

It’s done. My new novel. My new bloody novel! I’ve just written my 3rd book set to hit the shelves this September, what kind of craziness is this?!

Did I mention I had a baby in August? As in, gave birth to a whopper and have spent nearly every second since within nuzzling distance of him? How’s that for giving yourself a writing challenge? I tell you now, for someone who can’t jog for more than a minute without suffering that coppery-taste-in-the-mouth thing while violently rasping for air, I am pretty darned impressed with my new SAS-like endurance skillz. I kid you not, a girl feels pretty hardcore after writing till 2am, doing the 4am breastfeeding zombie thing and then crawling out of bed again to get the bigger kids to school.

Don’t try this at home, folks.

But we’re through it, thank goodness. Normal life, whatever brand of chaos that is, is steadily creeping back down the garden path of Casa Knight. Jesse Boy is now nine months into a fairly awesome life thus far, I’ve caught up with my other two marvellous sons (and Game of Thrones, obviously… that yearning was nearly killing me), I’ve pinned the husband down and snogged his face off a few times and after taking the last fortnight off doing anything even remotely authory, I am relieved to announce that this mama is now fully-coloured, trimmed of split-ends, well-rested and smooth-legged once more. For now anyway.

And I’m not the only one getting a good sprucing. Letting You Go is pretty much going through the same treatment over at the publisher’s. Basically I give them a hairy-legged, wobbly-bummed manuscript with a hair do like a bird’s nest, and they gently suggest which bits to prune, tighten and gloss.

Which means… oh yes, we’re neearly there! Nearly at the bit I dig the most! The part of the process where I can sit back and catch my breath and almost – almost – feel ready to laugh off all the endless nights I utterly loathed my plot ideas and pulled them apart and hated everything all that fretful, teary effort amounted to before somehow working out (with the help of a few editorial rescue missions) how to pull it all back together again.

Jeez, it’s ace to be out of that stage, I can tell ya. It’s exhausting enough just thinking about it.

But!

Boy oh boy, is it worth it.

After a few fallings out, I love my characters again. I love their story too and, dare I say it, I miss writing/reading about them. It all feels a bit weird without them featuring in my day to day, it feels a bit like we’ve had demanding house-guests for the last few months, eating our food, getting under our skin, stealing our family time. I’ve been desperate for them to bugger off and leave us alone only now I’ve recharged my batteries I quite fancy a few glasses of wine with them again. I hope I still feel that way when the author copies rock up in the post, I guess I’ll find out soon enough when I have a brand new spangly copy of my brand new spangly book clasped in these arthritic, nail-bitten hands of mine. I think it’ll be okay. I hope other people will think so too. And I don’t think it will be long after those advance copies arrive on my doorstep before I’m cracking on with Book 4, because holding your own book with your own name on the front is a pretty cool reminder of why the hard slog is totally worth it.